An Internet based business must, first and foremost, have an effective website. While most people immediately think of a user-friendly web site, it is just as important, perhaps more so, to have a search engine friendly website. It is, after all, a website’s rank on search engine results pages that will determine how many people arrive to visit the website in the first place. If no one finds the website, it simply doesn’t matter whether your site is user friendly or not. A website’s structure and content play a large part in its search engine rankings. Search engines use proprietary algorithms to determine a website’s search engine ranking for any given search term. There are many factors that are considered in that ranking, including the frequency of the use of those key words on the website as well as the number of related terms present. Simply adding more uses of the key word on the pages of the website, however, doesn’t work and may even have a negative effect on the site’s ranking. Search engines are wise to the practice of keyword stuffing and look to the context of the content in addition to the frequency of key word usage. If the key word comprises more than five or six percent of the entire text, most search engines will penalize the site for key word stuffing. Other ranking factors will also be affected by key word stuffing resulting in an additive effect for the penalty. For example, another important factor in determining a website’s search engine ranking is third party referrals. These third party referrals come in the form of links coming in from other websites. Websites that have similar, related content will receive higher weighting, as will highly popular websites. If the content of the base website isn’t of high quality and consists mainly of key words and phrases repeated over and over, it is unlikely that any popular web sites are going to include links to that website. Furthermore, most search engine algorithms are smart enough to identify the practice of link- exchanges wherein websites agree to link back to each other for the express purpose of trying to fool the search engines and this can also lead to search engine ranking penalties. That’s not to say that websites should not cultivate incoming links or even participate in high quality link building campaigns. Incoming links are important to the site’s rank, but must be done properly. For best effect, the linking site should have content related to the content on the target website, the link should be anchored with words or phrases that are highly relevant to the content, and the linking site should have a good page rank as well. Links from sites that the search engine has penalized for trying to game the system will have no value and may even result in penalties to the target site. http://www.internet-search-marketing.com
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